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Switching to bzr for tight Launchpad integration

Judging by what the duck says Midori must be the only project in the world migrating from git to bzr. Or maybe, it was just so surprisingly quick and simple that there’s no need to brag about it. In fact Launchpad itself performed the import automagically and the switch is really about updating documentation and a cuple of hyperlinks. It might’ve been harder if I wasn’t familiar with bzr yet; pushing the new trunk and flipping an option to make it the focus branch was all that was needed.

The old world

Why did we actually make this step? To make project management more efficient. Midori as a project roughly might be split into

bug triaging

reviewing contributions

implementing code

design decisions

roadmap

It turns out a huge bottle neck was the manual effort standing between these separate aspects. For example anyone doing bug triaging wouldn’t have direct access to code. And code review was always separate from both code and bug management. To the point that people end up waiting on, looking for and blocking on each other. And losing contributors, which is the worst thing to happen to any free software project.

The new world

There’s an obvious, easy way for anyone to push branches

Code review is integrated with branches and bugs

Anyone can become a reviewer, merge and push code

bzr vs. git

I do enjoy a proper emotional project bashing as much as the next guy, especially with a beer in front of me. But really, these days bzr and git both have a comparable share, personally I work on either one on and off. And at the end of the day what counts is the health of Midori as a project. Bazaar may well have the weaker storage efficiency and performance compared to git in a benchmark, but in this case git had the higher human cost.